Alex Karp, Peter Theil, and Palantir are serious threats to american democracy and should be stopped.
therobots927 · 2h ago
With a P/E of 530 its hard to imagine a better short opportunity in the market. As much as palantir likes to pretend its a software company it is a bespoke software company which has only slightly better scaling laws than a consulting company. Make no mistake I have the utmost respect (if fear is a form of respect) for their surveillance capabilities. But that doesn't justify the market cap.
Fade_Dance · 1h ago
At a certain point market flows tend to prop up big names, due to so much passive investing being market cap weighted. Those indexes are mostly blind and buy size for size's sake.
The Tesla example is probably a good base case to have. It has a mediocre outlook, extreme valuation, and is no longer minting millionaires, but it's also sort of a mediocre short. Big tends to stay big. (That is, unless capital flows reverse, ex: during the tariff scare, when international money was flowing out of the US for once. Then that same passive complex becomes a liability to those names that heavily lean on it).
therobots927 · 40m ago
I 100% agree with you, but at the same time that feels like a significant market inefficiency to me
p_ing · 2h ago
> But principal among them is our willingness to foster an unapologetically specific culture within this artist colony of a company
I hope he serves grilled cheese and Flavor Aid.
hn_throw_250822 · 2h ago
Hard to resist: that monologue was an excellent LARP. I want a dramatic reading version.
andsoitis · 2h ago
"The United States is not, and should not be permitted to become, a soft compromise and amalgam of global values and tastes.
A reticence or perhaps incapacity to pronounce and to prefer, beyond the shallow and ritualistic shaming of others in the public sphere that masquerades as thought, has had costs.
A fuller statement of the causes and consequences of this reticence is set forth in The Technological Republic. In short, however, a tolerance of everything, a shallow embrace of all views and perspectives as equally valid, often and unfortunately devolves into a belief in nothing."
blargey · 1h ago
All that fluff as a verbal sleigh of hand to twist and reframe CS Lewis' treatise against moral relativism (which proposes as an answer an objective morality derived from the commonalities of global cultures' ethical systems that he calls the "Tao").
Remove the rest of the letter ("In The Abolition of Man...") from this hollow framing, and it would read like a screed against Palantir. Does he have a datacenter hooked up to CS Lewis' grave?
Barrin92 · 37m ago
>hand to twist and reframe CS Lewis
and also Tolkien obviously with the name of the company. I never understood the whole Peter Thiel LOTR-industrial-complex thing that makes a mockery out of the Christian universalism of Lewis and Tolkien. Thiel, Karp and the whole cohort all sound like Oswald Spengler, not like Lewis.
jonathrg · 2h ago
This reads like a Bryce P. Tetraeder quote
lazide · 2h ago
Like him or hate him, he has an ethos. /s
linotype · 16m ago
Is all of Silicon Valley on ketamine?
ungreased0675 · 1h ago
That was very funny. I enjoyed reading it. Thanks for sharing.
belter · 2h ago
With less fluff, a report on the economics of Palantir by Citron Research:
Read so as not to be a fool, soon parted with it's money.
Note some current PE values...
NVIDIA PE: 57,33
Apple PE: 34,62
Microsoft PE: 37,18
Palantir PE: 527,52
The rest of letter, is a kind of anti-woke stance, billionaire victim complex so frequently seen now. Just positioning to align with current US political trends and secure government contracts, especially given Palantir heavy reliance on defense spending.
therobots927 · 1h ago
Alex Karp knows that if you dont aggresively preempt criticism you risk being painted as the villain, so he sets the framing as "pro west" vs. "anti west". It's just a reframing of the capitalism vs communism justification for Vietnam in addition to the wide scale destruction carried out against Latin American democracies. if it looks like a spook, walks like a spook, and quacks like a spook, it's a spook. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Palantir was assisting with the CIA's more clandestine activities like funneling drug money and weapons to terrorist groups opposing inconvenient international leaders.
No comments yet
dismalaf · 1h ago
Nvidia and Palantir PE values are at least based on future expectations...
MS and Apple's are based on what? Their margins don't have much room to get better so to increase income by 3-4x they need to increase revenue by a similar factor. Which is hard to imagine.
Or we're just in an asset price bubble, which I think we are.
browningstreet · 1h ago
MS and Apple PEs are based on stability. They’ll
manage better than most to preserve their stability in all of the randomness ahead.
Palantir’s is based on the probability things get worse and they get more government contracts. In fact, it’s a bet on how much worse things can get.
dismalaf · 54m ago
> MS and Apple PEs are based on stability.
Definitely not how equities are priced.
wqaatwt · 1h ago
Apple spends a lot on buybacks so future expectations of them maintaining current margins might be sufficient
The Tesla example is probably a good base case to have. It has a mediocre outlook, extreme valuation, and is no longer minting millionaires, but it's also sort of a mediocre short. Big tends to stay big. (That is, unless capital flows reverse, ex: during the tariff scare, when international money was flowing out of the US for once. Then that same passive complex becomes a liability to those names that heavily lean on it).
I hope he serves grilled cheese and Flavor Aid.
A reticence or perhaps incapacity to pronounce and to prefer, beyond the shallow and ritualistic shaming of others in the public sphere that masquerades as thought, has had costs.
A fuller statement of the causes and consequences of this reticence is set forth in The Technological Republic. In short, however, a tolerance of everything, a shallow embrace of all views and perspectives as equally valid, often and unfortunately devolves into a belief in nothing."
Remove the rest of the letter ("In The Abolition of Man...") from this hollow framing, and it would read like a screed against Palantir. Does he have a datacenter hooked up to CS Lewis' grave?
and also Tolkien obviously with the name of the company. I never understood the whole Peter Thiel LOTR-industrial-complex thing that makes a mockery out of the Christian universalism of Lewis and Tolkien. Thiel, Karp and the whole cohort all sound like Oswald Spengler, not like Lewis.
https://citronresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/OpenAI...
Read so as not to be a fool, soon parted with it's money.
Note some current PE values...
NVIDIA PE: 57,33
Apple PE: 34,62
Microsoft PE: 37,18
Palantir PE: 527,52
The rest of letter, is a kind of anti-woke stance, billionaire victim complex so frequently seen now. Just positioning to align with current US political trends and secure government contracts, especially given Palantir heavy reliance on defense spending.
No comments yet
MS and Apple's are based on what? Their margins don't have much room to get better so to increase income by 3-4x they need to increase revenue by a similar factor. Which is hard to imagine.
Or we're just in an asset price bubble, which I think we are.
Palantir’s is based on the probability things get worse and they get more government contracts. In fact, it’s a bet on how much worse things can get.
Definitely not how equities are priced.